Essential Skills that Marketers Need to Succeed This Year

It’s not enough to pull off a successful online marketing campaign. You got to have the skills and know-how to stay effective and competitive over time so users will continue to follow you and engage with your online content. Read on to learn about the essential skills marketers need in 2017 to carry out social media best practices for your company.

Writing Skills: Writing is one of the top skills a marketer needs in today’s online marketing world. Online marketing creates a brand’s online presence, and a brand’s voice is becoming more and more crucial as people shop more online. Customers go to the Internet to research products, make purchases, order services, read reviews, and more. A marketer needs the skill to produce quality content, needs editing capability, and needs the knowledge to oversee content creation across various platforms.

Creativity: It’s not enough to be a good writer. A marketer has to use out-of-the-box thinking to figure out how to tap into markets and which stories to publish on the company’s profiles. Imagination is needed to create fresh social media campaigns, unique contests, and original videos and hashtags. Skillful marketers are versatile and come up with ideas for different social media networks.

Time Management: On top of being creative, a marketer needs the management skills to harness that creativity and get the work done. An efficient market makes use of tools and time to publish across multiple social media networks on a daily basis. Don’t forget to respond to customers online in a timely manner. Using tools like Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts and keep track of engagement. Make use of these tools and create a content schedule. You should always have written content ready to go.

Testing: To truly understand how a company’s marketing efforts are making an impact, the marketer needs to be able to use numbers to tell a story. Social media analytics data are essential to understanding what is working for your audience and what isn’t. For example, A/B test elements like headlines, caption length, posting times and landing pages. Once you understand how to tweak your work, you’ll get more effective results with the same amount of effort. Testing will also allow you to make important decisions about the success of a paid advertising budget.

Readers: Marketers know how to leverage current news and the latest trends in a company’s field as well as social media trends to attract an audience. An effective marketer reads blogs, pays attention to the content published by their peers and influencers in their area, and stays up-to-date with each social media network’s options and features.

Driven: Social media marketers are task-oriented people who are self-sufficient and manage their time well. To successfully manage a social media campaign, a marketer needs to know how to delegate and how to work on a team. For example, a social media marketer may ask everyone at the company to tweet or post to the company’s Pinterest. As a result, more quality content is produced, and since everyone is contributing, no one’s time is wasted.

Design Skills: You don’t need advanced design skills to be a successful marketer, but it does help to know some graphic design. If a marketer doesn’t have design skills, then they need to be able to delegate and communicate effectively with the company’s graphic designer.

Storytelling: A marketer is a storyteller who uses all the tools at their disposal to create buzz about a company or a service. They have to make decisions like which infographics to post when, what to feature on the company’s website, and how to communicate numbers in a visual manner. Marketers need to be able to tell a narrative to grab people’s attention and to keep it.

Attitude: A marketer is a person who works well under pressure and is an excellent problem-solver. To do well in marketing, a friendly and positive attitude goes a long way. Having a smile and a friendly voice for collaborators, customers, in online environments, and in-person conferences makes all the difference.

You learn as you go. Analyze what you have been able to accomplish this past year and how you’ve grown. Come up with marketing goals for the year as well as a list of your accomplishments. Keep writing and keep learning!

To learn more about how to develop and expand your online marketing, contact Square 1 Group for more information. On our website, you’ll see that we specialize in providing outstanding web design for individual clients.